Among other subjects, I teach film criticism. American Beauty is a film that we study in class. As the semesters go by though, I’ve grown less comfortable featuring Lester Burnham on the syllabus. Don’t get me wrong–we talk (and the students read) about so much of the film’s twisted shit (e.g. patriarchal politics, the centrality of heteronormative white masculinity, incest metaphors, all-around general misogyny). In other words, we fully vet the film’s problematic representations.
I think the reason I get less and less comfortable as the course curator who reifies the film is (gulp) that I hold more affinity for Lester Burnham. I’ve told my friends that my mid-life crisis has been foisted upon me (I suppose I’ll get to it in later posts), and I’m angry and lost and hurt by it. So by result, it is easier and easier for me to relate to the ‘ordinary guy with nothing to lose’ posture. As I proclaimed in my first post, hello, hostility!
But yes, I know, I get it: this is a time when we (societally, culturally) revel in antiheroes. Nothing too unique about this. But I think I could argue the point that the antiheroes we typically applaud, while relatable in some ways (e.g. Walter White, who began as a good teacher with bad healthcare), also are plausibly different from ourselves in fundamental ways (e.g. Heisenberg, drug kingpin extraordinaire!). Not so for me when it comes to Lester. And *spoiler alert* if you haven’t seen the film, Lester’s fate at the end is not only bleak but also one of the most beautiful parts of the film. I sometimes think, moreover, that it is the quintessential Beauty of its title.
Now that, as Brad would say (in the clip above), seems pretty twisted as fuck.
